Last year, Lovett launched Lab Atlanta (LAB ATL), an innovative new school model for 10th graders. Designed as a semester school, LAB ATL enrolls students from Atlanta’s public and independent schools in an honors-level, experiential, and seminar-like study of the city and challenges the students to complete capstones in areas of interest they uncover. The first two semesters have been run as small pilots, helping us learn how best to integrate students across a diverse landscape both socially and academically. Our pilots have been enormously helpful and successful. Hunter Smith, one of the founding students in our Spring 2017 cohort, has just returned from Stanford where she presented her capstone on affordable housing at the FabLearn conference! Our current students (coming from Drew Charter, Lovett, Paideia, Grady, and North Atlanta) and their families are exclaiming over the depth of learning, the incredible support for each student in developing his/her voice--both written and orally--, the wide-ranging experiences in the city (and the expansive network of people to whom students have access), and the opportunity to learn with new friends across the zip codes of Atlanta.

We are very pleased to announce today that after extensive work with Atlanta Public Schools, the Georgia Department of Education, and the Georgia High School Athletic Association, Lab Atlanta has been approved as a ground-breaking new model that will allow students who attend LABATL to be jointly enrolled at their home school. Effective immediately, students who are accepted and enroll at LABATL for a semester of 10th grade may be enrolled at their home school and participate in athletics and extracurricular activities outside of the school day, subject to the home school’s conditions and requirements. The LAB ATL daily schedule will move back and run from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. in order to allow time for students to return to their home schools as needed in the afternoon. We are very excited to be able now to take our program to a scale of 24 students per semester, and we are inviting current 10th graders to consider LABATL for the upcoming spring semester. We also encourage current 8th and 9th grade families to consider the opportunity for 10th grade.

Lab Atlanta has a limited number of openings per school and per semester. Applications for the upcoming spring semester (again, current 10th graders only) are now open and will close on Monday, November 14, 2017. The application and extensive information about the Lab Atlanta semester can be found at www.labatlanta.org. Admissions decisions will be made by Monday, December 4.

If you are interested in touring Lab Atlanta or want more information, please reach out directly to Laura Deisley, Executive Director, at laura.deisley@lovett.org or at (470) 355-4894.

Please join us in celebrating this milestone in our ongoing efforts to connect Atlanta area students more authentically to the city and to one another.

Lab Atlanta launched officially in January 2017 with a pilot cohort of 10 students from Atlanta area public and private schools. It was a semester filled with learning as we prototyped, pivoted (our favorite word last spring), and performed while responding to our new, dynamic, and exciting learning environment. What follows is a brief overview of the inaugural semester as presented to our many supporters. Most telling are the student reflections, some of which are included here, and the incredible testimonials from parents as well as colleges and universities who visited us last year. (Many of these can be found interspersed throughout our website.)

We are in the midst of another focused pilot this fall before opening our doors to a full cohort of students in January. Some very exciting announcements are forthcoming on that front. Behind the scenes, our Lab Atlanta Advisory Board launches this month with our first full board meeting. You can read more about our extraordinary members who are representative of a broad swath of Atlanta here.

Thank you to all who are walking alongside us in this journey to reimagine school as a broader community and to celebrate the rich, diverse, creative, brilliant young minds that are ripe to make a difference in Atlanta. And, many thanks to the donors who are making this dreamwork possible.

On Friday, March 31st, our students travelled to the National Archives Atlanta branch to conduct research in their extensive collection of manuscripts, primary source documents, and other historical objects. Avery, one of our students on that learning expedition, wrote the following reflection on her experiences that day.

Meet Payton: Payton enjoys drawing, playing basketball, and building and designing structures as an architect would. He is the president of his past school’s robotic club and aspires to be an architect or a general designer. Payton is on a journey at Lab Atlanta. He doesn't enjoy school, but looks at Lab Atlanta to find what he is passionate about.

Meet Sarah:Sarah is one of the inaugural students at LAB Atlanta. She just turned 16 this month, and is enjoying the new freedom. She has been a resident of Atlanta most of her life. Sarah was born at Northside Hospital, and lived in Buckhead for a few years before relocating to LaGrange Georgia. She moved back to Atlanta after three years, and has resided here since then. She loves to read, bake, clean and organize, make collages, and decorate. Her passion in life is to learn, not simply memorize, but truly learn. By attending LAB Atlanta, she hopes to finally live out her passion.

Last week was the first day of work with The Founding Class of Lab Atlanta. Students and Faculty discussed and practiced acute observation with a walk in Midtown and a visit at MODA. Haleigh Jones wrote this short piece to reflect on her day...

Early this Monday morning our associate director, three full-time faculty, and I opened the doors for the first time at Lab Atlanta's new home here at 40 Inwood Circle. Tucked behind The Temple, Invesco and Steelcase (and across the street from SCAD's Digital Media Center and the long-time home of WSB-TV) the Iconologic Building is such a welcoming spot. We occupy 3 floors of this 4 story building with uber-creative friends downstairs, loads of spectacular natural light, and 7,000 square feet of community rooms, galleries, student studios, partner spaces, and faculty offices...

My favorite topic of conversation with people who relocate to Atlanta is to find out how they make sense of it. This is not an easy task in a city that pretty much moves around the clock and offers a cornucopia of things to do to keep you entertained and informed. With time though, newcomers gradually build their own experience of Atlanta through the places in the city where they live, work, and play...

Thinking things. One of the key concerns I have as an educator and a parent is how little we ask our students and children to do this thing called "thinking." We have conditioned them to react, respond and fill in the blank—to jump through the next hoop- but we have done little to prepare them to "figure it out." In our rush to get to the next thing on the filled-to-the-brim daily calendar or the next content area in a mile-wide and inch-deep curriculum, we adults do all the heavy lifting. And, yet we wonder why we are all so tired and why students/our kids keep looking at us and asking what to do next.

I detest Atlanta traffic. If you have lived in this city long enough, you too might feel a sense of dread when it comes to tackling the morning, afternoon or weekend rush hours. Despite the long commute times, stressful drives, and occasional feelings of social isolation, we drive. We view driving as a necessity, not an option...but the only sound choice. Yet, in making this choice, we miss out on fully experiencing the world. We miss out on community. We miss out on “seeing.” After all, who has time to contemplate the architecture, people or cultural landmarks at a stop light? We have places to be and people to see. We no longer live in the moment. The geography has become a distraction.